A Froehlich Recently Auctioned

Dartmouth just auctioned off a date with my cousin for their Asian Relief fund. Note the young lady in front with her hand held high and proud--they can't get enough of him. (link)

My Girlfriend Represents

This past weekend my clever girlfriend competed in the New England Regionals for the National Trial Competition. Her law school, Suffolk Law in Boston, sent two teams, each made up of three law students. The top 2 teams (out of 22) advance to Nationals, which takes place at the end of March in Dallas, Texas. As a testament to their court room prowess, both Suffolk teams advanced beating out, among others, Harvard Law, UConn, and Boston College. My girlfriend's team did the "near impossible" and finished with a perfect 5-0 record.

“The National Trial Competition (NTC) is one of the oldest and most prestigious mock trial competitions in the United States. Every ABA-accredited law school in the country is invited to compete... The competition will rely on more than 25 judges from the federal and state court systems, over 100 lawyers from the New Hampshire bar and 150 students from Pierce Law to act as judges, jurors and witnesses,” says Professor Albert ‘Buzz’ Scherr, director of the Pierce Law’s Trial Advocacy Program.

According to the Texas Young Lawyers Association homepage, "In addition to the prestige of competing at the top levels of one of the oldest, most respected trial competitions in the country, winning treams are provided many prize incentives. Customarily the Best Oral Advocate (and, if not on the same team, a member of the championship team) is invited to the ACTL annual meeting, at which the winning team is presented with a silver bowl and the $10,000 Kraft W. Eidman Award sponsored by Fulbright & Jaworski. The Best Oral Advocate receives the George A. Spielberg Award sponsored by Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobsen. The $5,000 award to the second-place team is sponsored by the firm of Beck, Redden & Secrest. "

Google Quote of the Day

You know your day is going well when your personalized Google quote of the day is "Information is temporarily unavailable." Hmm, I wonder who said that.

Also, in other Google news, my clever girlfriend found out today that if you search for "search" in Google, Google is actually the 5th result from the top behind MSN Search and Lycos of all things.

10 Ways Cheney Can Kill You

In light of the recent man-hunt conducted by Dick Cheney in which he shot and injured a 78 year-old man in the face, neck and upper torso (link), here's a celebratory picture memorializing Cheney's brutality.

Frail

Frail is a .NET visualization toolkit that I'm working on (which I jokingly refer to as a "robust visualization toolkit"). Basically, it's an incorporation of all my visualization work into a generic package. It's based on my own experiences using really good Java vis toolkits like JUNG and JFreeChart. For the most part, though, it closely resembles Jeffrey Heer's Prefuse toolkit (also in Java) -- which is a really phenomenal interactive graphics toolkit that supports layout animations, distortions, graph filtering, color interpolation, etc. Here's a low res screen shot -- click on it to see a slightly bigger version. I implemented panning and zooming last night.

Black Sabbath + Madeleine Peyroux

I was browsing the iTunes music store tonight and happened across Geezer Butler's celebrity playlist. He's the longtime bassist of Black Sabbath -- a band famous for ushering in a new era of hard rock, with a macabre subtext :) In contrast to the dark sound Sabbath is known for, Geezer has quite an ecclectic mix of blues (e.g. madeleine peyroux, etta james), country (e.g. alison krauss), electronica (e.g. lamb), and, of course, slayer.

UDub, (cough), Top of List, (cough)

http://vcmike.blogspot.com/2006/01/ranking-colleges-using-google-and-oss.html

Pretty cool use of Google regardless of the findings.

Update September 13, 10:17PM: Not that it makes much of a difference here, but I was trying to be tongue-in-cheek with this post. You see, I got to the University of Washington so I like any ranking in which it tops the list (well, any positively connoted ranking). Regardless, it's a great university.